“Something bad’s about to happen, lover. I’m not sure what, but it doesn’t feel good,” she commented.
Ryan looked at her. Her hair was waving in the breeze, curling around her head. It wasn’t tight and defensive, but it was alarmed. He turned to the other companions.
“Triple-red—keep your blasters ready.”
“Shouldn’t we tell the others?” Sharona asked, readying her own Vortak precision pistol, which she had kept hidden about her person.
Ryan shook his head. “They’ve got to learn these things the hard way. Besides, what am I going to tell them? They don’t really know much about Krysty being able to sense trouble.”
Sharona shrugged. “Have it your own way, Ryan.”
The one-eyed man shot her a glance. “I will,” he said harshly.
Dean was about to respond when they were distracted by a shout from the front of the caravan.
“Water ahead—and what the hell is that?”
Looking to where the spring lay, the companions could see a mass of naked people…no, not people, for there was something animalistic about the group, who acted more like a pack of wild dogs.
“Stickies!” J.B. exclaimed.
Markos turned. “What are stickies?”
Ryan shook his head. “Time for explanations later. Just know that they’re vicious and they need chilling!”
His words came not a moment too soon, as the pack by the spring sighted the caravan and turned to charge toward them. From the manner in which they had been greedily consuming from the spring, they had probably not seen water for some time…by which token, they had probably not seen food for as long. And the Pilatans would look like good food to them.
“Don’t let them get near. Just blast the bastards!” Ryan yelled.
He mentally weighed the odds. At a rough glance, it seemed as though there were as many stickies as there were Pilatans, and the caravan was armed. Against that, many of the Pilatans were children, or old, and none of them had experience of what a stickie was capable of. With their sharp teeth, their bloodlust frenzy, and the flattened, rubbery suckers on their fingers that could grip and crush a victim, it would be a close-run thing. And which way it would run, he didn’t want to predict.
The companions, under Ryan’s direction stepped away from the main body of the caravan and began to fire on the stickies. There was still enough distance between the blasters and the intended victims for a lot of the shooting to be random rather than aimed, but several of the creatures went down either chilled or fatally wounded as the slugs from the handblasters and the charges from Doc’s LeMat percussion pistol, J.B.’s M-4000 and Ryan’s SIG-Sauer ripped through them. J.B.’s load of barbed metal flechettes were particularly effective, as the spiked and white-hot metal ripped through the mass of flesh that was the crowd of charging stickies, mangling bone and filling the air with a fine mist of blood.
However, even though some of their number hit the dirt, the promise of food and the fear caused by the carnage among them spurred the stickies on even more and they continued their charge toward the Pilatan caravan.
“What manner of creatures are these?” Sineta whispered in awe. As most of the Pilatans, she hadn’t yet started to fire, frozen in surprise and horror as she watched the mutie horde cover the distance between the spring and the caravan with a deceptively fast, loping strides. They were gaining ground quickly—too quickly for Markos, one of the only Pilatans with the presence of mind to fire on the approaching danger, and he turned and yelled at his people.
“They’re dangerous and deadly if you don’t start firing,” Mildred screamed in the baron’s ear as she ran to her side, still snapping off shots from her ZKR, and reloading on the run. “Now start shooting, for God’s sakes, and aim for their heads!”
Galvanized into action by Mildred and Markos, the baron and the rest of the Pilatans began to fire. But some of the stickies had made enough ground to now be on top of the caravan. One grabbed at a sec man, frozen in fear, and wrestled him to the ground, the suckers tearing the flesh on his face as the sharp rows of teeth made to rip at his throat and shoulder. His scream was high, built on fear and pain.